Federal prosecutors dropped a felony hacking charge Thursday against a Defense Department intelligence analyst who poked around in a system involved in a national terrorism investigation.

The analyst, Brian Keith Montgomery, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge instead, settling the case and making prison time unlikely.

Montgomery held a top secret clearance while working on a covert program at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — the spy agency in charge of satellite and aerial image collection. On April 9, while stationed at an NGA facility on Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia, the 10-year agency veteran saw a message that “provided significant detail about a classified operation” that was unrelated to his job, according to a court affidavit filed by a Pentagon investigator.

The analyst twice logged in to a system involved in the terrorism investigation: first on April 9, when he stayed on for two hours, and then on April 14. He’d gotten the password from another classified message to which he also had legitimate access. Montgomery later told investigators that he hadn’t noticed a warning in the message advising that only personnel participating in the classified operation were authorized to use the password./quote]